The New Hite Report – Controversy over the Numbers In 1968 researcher Shere Hite shocked conservative America with her famous “Hite Report” on the permissive sexual attitudes of American men and women. Twenty years later, Hite was surrounded by controversy again with her book, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress (Knopf Press, 1988). In this new Hite report, she reveals some starting statistics describing how women feel about contemporary relationships:     84% of women are not emotionally satisfied with their relationship 95% of women report “emotional and psychological harassment” from their men 70% of women married 5 years or more are having extramarital affairs Only 13% of women married more than 2 years are “in love”
Hite conducted the survey by mailing out 100,000 questionnaires to women across the country over a 7 year period. She sent questionnaires to a wide variety of organizations and asked them to circulate the questionnaires to their members. She mentions that they included church groups, women’s voting and political groups, women’s rights organizations and counseling and walk-in centers for women. Hite also relied on respondents who wrote in for copies of the questionnaire (apparently, readers of her past books and those who saw interviews on television and in the press). Each questionnaire consisted of 127 open-ended questions, many with numerous sub-questions and follow-up. Hite’s instructions read: “It is not necessary to answer every question. Feel free to skip around and answer those questions you choose.” Approximately 4,500 completed questionnaires were returned for a response rate of 4.5% and they form the data set from which these percentages were determined. Hite claims that the survey results imply that vast numbers of women are “suffering a lot of pain in their love relationships with men.”
Questions:
1. Identify the population of interest to Shere Hite. 2. What inferences did Hite make about the population? Comment on the reliability of these inferences.